Helena Meyer-Knapp

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Biographical Note

I have made peace-making my professional life’s work. I have acted as a leader in community-based work for peace both locally and nationally. In 2003 I published Dangerous Peace-Making, a book on how communities and nations bring their wars to end. I was a founding faculty, not in the early days, but in the creation of a sustained Evening and Weekend Studies curriculum at Evergreen teaching international relations, community action, ethics and political studies in that part of the college from 1987 until my retirement in 2008. Since then I have been working in Korea and Japan and teaching at the college one quarter a year. My community wide endeavors are currently channeled through active support for Garden Raised Bounty – food and farming for low income families in South Puget Sound.

How did Evergreen help you in your career?

Interdisciplinary thinking has always come naturally, and at Evergreen, among wonderful colleagues I developed the original inclination into skill. Evergreen's give foci and the expectations it made explicit for its graduates make rich guidelines for serious life as an academic whether teacher or student. I worked for quite a few years among the students and the faculty here who were in the midst of serious difficulties, serving both as Campus Grievance Officer and as Faculty Conflict Resolution Officer -- an education in peacemaking at the ground level. The college sent me to Japan as an exchange faculty member in Kobe. And the college was hospitable always to any of our children who happened to be here. Was Evergreen always constructive in its contributions to my career? By no means. But the barriers also helped make it a transformative working environment.